Exchange Server Pro » Articles http://exchangeserverpro.com Microsoft Exchange Server News - Tips - Tutorials Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:00:56 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Exchange Server 2012? http://exchangeserverpro.com/exchange-server-2012 http://exchangeserverpro.com/exchange-server-2012#comments Tue, 31 Jan 2012 02:47:27 +0000 Paul Cunningham http://exchangeserverpro.com/?p=4406 Microsoft today announced that they have reached the Technical Preview Program milestone for “Office 15″ development. Office 15 is the current name of the next generation of Microsoft Office products and services (including server products).

During the Technical Preview Microsoft works with a selection of customers under strict non-disclosure to test their products in real world situations so that the final product releases can be improved.

According to the announcement by PJ Hough, CVP of Development, Microsoft Office Division:

With Office 15, for the first time ever, we will simultaneously update our cloud services, servers, and mobile and PC clients for Office, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, Project, and Visio.

With the Technical Preview program underway Hough lets us know that:

…everyone will have the opportunity to try the Office 15 public beta later this summer.

Assuming Microsoft is able to release a beta of Exchange 15 by August this year, what does that mean for for a possible RTM in 2012?

Brian Winstead put forward his theory in his Windows IT Pro column back in October 2011:

If the Exchange team follows the pattern of previous releases, I’d expect them to release a public beta for Exchange 15 by mid-year 2012, perhaps as early as April or May, and if all goes well, the final version would be out by the end of next year. As for the final name, for the past couple of releases, they’ve looked forward and applied the year after the actual release year. So, Exchange Server 2007 was released at the end of 2006, and Exchange Server 2010 came at the end of 2009. My suspicion is they would avoid the bad luck omen of taking that route if they release in 2012 and might just stick with Exchange Server 2012.

I tend to agree that it is unlikely we’ll see a “2013″ naming for the next generation of Office products.

Exchange Server 2010 was released as a public beta in April 2009, and reached RTM slightly less than 6 months later. So a “summer” beta release of “Exchange 15″ followed by some hard work by Microsoft could see an “Exchange 2012″ RTM perhaps around late November.

Read Microsoft’s “Office 15″ announcement here:

 

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]]> http://exchangeserverpro.com/exchange-server-2012/feed 0 Exchange 2010 FAQ: Are Wildcard SSL Certificates Supported? http://exchangeserverpro.com/exchange-2010-wildcard-ssl-certificates http://exchangeserverpro.com/exchange-2010-wildcard-ssl-certificates#comments Mon, 19 Dec 2011 06:36:11 +0000 Paul Cunningham http://exchangeserverpro.com/?p=4360 Question: can I use a wildcard SSL certificate on my Exchange 2010 server?

Answer: Yes, you can.

Often people ask me whether wildcard SSL certificates can be used with Exchange Server 2010, because they have heard that they are either unsupported, not secure, or just not recommended.

What is a wildcard SSL certificate? From Microsoft TechNet:

A wildcard certificate is designed to support a domain and multiple subdomains. For example, configuring a wildcard certificate for *.contoso.com results in a certificate that will work for mail.contoso.com, web.contoso.com, and autodiscover.contoso.com.

The attractiveness of wildcard SSL certificates is that they are usually cheaper than other types of certificates, and they make some Exchange Server configurations easier to manage.

Support for Exchange 2010 and Wildcard SSL Certificates

The support question is a relatively easy one to answer. Yes they are supported from a vendor perspective. One clue for this is that wildcard SSL certificates are an option in the Exchange 2010 new certificate wizard. Microsoft does not make a habit of including options in Exchange Server that will lead you down an unsupported path.

However they are not supported for all scenarios. For example:

  • wildcard certificates can’t be used in conjunction with OCS 2007 (eg for secure communications for UM/OWA integration)
  • wildcard certificates are not supported for older mobile devices such as Windows Mobile 5.0

Security Implications for Exchange 2010 and Wildcard SSL Certificates

The security question is also relatively easy to answer. The common assumption is that wildcard SSL certificates are less secure than other SSL certificates.

Microsoft’s own documentation even references “security implications”.

…many customers are uncomfortable with the security implications of maintaining a certificate that can be used for any sub-domain. A more secure alternative is to list each of the required domains as SANs in the certificate. By default, this approach is used when certificate requests are generated by Exchange.

Verisign/Symantec describes some of those implications here:

  • Security: If one server or sub-domain is compromised, all sub-domains may be compromised.
  • Management: If the wildcard certificate needs to be revoked, all sub-domains will need a new certificate.

However, put those concerns in the context of your Exchange organization. If you’re using a wildcard SSL certificate to secure a single, internet-facing Client Access server then the above issues do not create much concern.

On the other hand if you’re deploying a large, global Exchange organization with multiple geographic entry points for various services, or those services spread over many services, then those issues are of greater concern.

Summary

So in conclusion, yes Exchange 2010 supports wildcard SSL certificates and no they are not necessarily less secure than other certificates.

However, do your due diligence and make sure that the specific support and security scenarios that do exist will not adversely impact your own Exchange 2010 deployment.

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]]> http://exchangeserverpro.com/exchange-2010-wildcard-ssl-certificates/feed 1 Should You Defrag Exchange Server Mailbox Databases? http://exchangeserverpro.com/defrag-exchange-server-mailbox-databases http://exchangeserverpro.com/defrag-exchange-server-mailbox-databases#comments Mon, 14 Nov 2011 11:52:24 +0000 Paul Cunningham http://exchangeserverpro.com/?p=4256 In a recent article I demonstrated how to defrag an Exchange 2010 mailbox database. Since publishing that post a discussion has been ongoing in the comments about some of the pros and cons of defragging databases, as well as the implications for databases in an Exchange 2010 DAG (because my article specifically said not to follow the instructions for DAGs).

So, first things first…

Should Database Defragmentation be Regular Maintenance?

For the answer to that question I’m going to refer to the most authoritative source on Exchange Server – Scott Schnoll, Principal Technical Writer at Microsoft.

What was I doing when he tweeted that to me? I was defragging some mailbox databases :D

But was I doing that as part of regular maintenance? No I wasn’t, and neither should you :)  In my case I was defragging some databases in a site where we have more than 200 mailbox databases. If I defragged 3-4 of those per week each database would still only get defragged once a year.

Of course I’d prefer that I never had to defrag them at all. For one thing it means working on a Friday night. Regular defrags would also probably suggest we’re not managing our capacity properly.  But there are other reasons not to as well.

Reasons Not to Defrag Mailbox Databases

So why shouldn’t you defrag a mailbox database? Well let’s consider what is involved in a defrag.

First the database is dismounted. Then the offline defrag occurs, which in effect writes a brand new database file of the data within the database, excluding the white space. Then the database is remounted again and, ideally, a backup is taken immediately.

So you can already see three pretty good reasons not to defrag databases.

  • It requires an outage (at best this is an inconvenience for the business, at worst it may impact SLAs)
  • There is the risk of corruption as the new database file is written
  • It complicates your backup/recovery scenarios for periods before and after the defrag

Reasons to Defrag Mailbox Databases

But despite those reasons sometimes we have to be realistic about these things, and a defrag is necessary. Often in my case there are considerations such as:

  • No additional storage available to create a new database to migrate the mailboxes to (or only available at significant cost)
  • Migrations would take several days of minor outages for groups of users, instead of one single outage for all users on that database
  • There are active alerts for low free space on the storage for that database that need to be cleared

So in some cases a defrag is the best (or only) course of action.

What about Exchange Server 2010 DAGs?

So why did I say in my previous article not to follow that procedure for mailbox databases on servers in a DAG?

The main reason is that it breaks the resilience of the DAG for that mailbox database. When you defrag a mailbox database you also then need to reseed it to all of the other mailbox servers that host a copy of that database. So for that period of time between the database being defragged, and the reseed completing, your database is not protected by the continuous replication of the DAG.

The second reason is that moving mailboxes within an Exchange 2010 environment can be performed almost as a no-outage scenario for the end user. In previous versions of Exchange Server if you moved mailboxes instead of defragging databases the end users still experience an outage either way. However in Exchange Server 2010 the client experience is much better thanks to online mailbox moves.

One commenter actually contacted Microsoft Support to see if there was a way to run the defrags on passive mailbox database copies. To my surprise Microsoft actually did have a process for this, but as you can see it is quite complex and in my opinion is more effort and risk than it is really worth.

What do you think?

What do you think about defragging mailbox databases? Is it something you do regularly? Or do you avoid it in favour of other methods of achieving the same outcome?

Leave a comment below with your thoughts.

Update – two good discussions going on about this in the Exchange Server Pros and MSExchange.org groups on LinkedIn.

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]]> http://exchangeserverpro.com/defrag-exchange-server-mailbox-databases/feed 1 Exchange 2010: Are Passive Database Copies Included in Backups of DAG Members? http://exchangeserverpro.com/exchange-2010-passive-database-copies-included-backups-dag-members http://exchangeserverpro.com/exchange-2010-passive-database-copies-included-backups-dag-members#comments Sun, 06 Nov 2011 04:23:45 +0000 Paul Cunningham http://exchangeserverpro.com/?p=4217 In my article on backup error event id 2137 and what it means for Exchange 2010 a reader asked whether backups of Exchange 2010 DAG members include both the active and passive database copies.

Update: according to Microsoft, “All database copies can be backed up using an Exchange-aware, Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)-based backup application. However, the built-in support for Windows Server Backup is for active copies only. You can’t use Windows Server Backup to back up passive copies.” The rest of the article below has been left unedited, however be aware that the example demonstrated is of an unsupported scenario

The short answer is yes, however there are some important considerations to be aware of. From Microsoft TechNet:

Passive mailbox database copies are backed up using a separate VSS writer in the Microsoft Exchange Replication service. The Microsoft Exchange Replication service VSS Writer doesn’t support restores. Although you can back up a passive mailbox database copy using Microsoft System Center Data Protection Manager or a third-party Exchange-aware VSS-based application, you can’t perform a VSS restore directly to a passive mailbox database copy. However, you can perform a VSS restore to an alternate location, suspend replication to the passive copy, and then copy the database and log files from the alternate location to the location of the passive database copy in the file system.

To demonstrate this, here you can see the mailbox databases MB-HO-* that are currently active on server HO-EX2010-MB2. They have no LastFullBackup timestamp because they have never been backed up.

[PS] C:\>Get-MailboxDatabase -status | ft name,mounted*,lastfull* -auto

Name     MountedOnServer                     Mounted LastFullBackup
----     ---------------                     ------- --------------
MB-HO-01 HO-EX2010-MB2.exchangeserverpro.net    True
MB-HO-02 HO-EX2010-MB2.exchangeserverpro.net    True
MB-HO-03 HO-EX2010-MB2.exchangeserverpro.net    True
MB-BR-01 BR-EX2010-MB.exchangeserverpro.net     True

On server HO-EX2010-MB1 I ran a mailbox server backup using Windows Server Backup.

After the backup completed the following can be seen. First, the LastFullBackup time stamp has not been written.

[PS] C:\>Get-MailboxDatabase -status | ft name,mounted*,lastfull* -auto

Name     MountedOnServer                     Mounted LastFullBackup
----     ---------------                     ------- --------------
MB-HO-02 HO-EX2010-MB2.exchangeserverpro.net    True
MB-HO-01 HO-EX2010-MB2.exchangeserverpro.net    True
MB-HO-03 HO-EX2010-MB2.exchangeserverpro.net    True

Next, the disk that the backups were written to contain VHD files matching the size of the data stored on the backed up volumes. For example, the F: (Data) drive holds about 2Gb of data, and the VHD for that volume is about the same size.

Because we can mount the VHD as a disk on the server we have the opportunity to inspect the contents inside of it.

We can see that even though it was not the active databases at the time of the backup, the EDB file for database MB-HO-01 (and others) was still backed up by the server.

[PS] C:\>Get-ChildItem H:\ -Recurse | where {$_.name -like "*.edb"} | select name

Name
----
HO-PF-01.edb
MB-HO-01.edb
MB-HO-02.edb
MB-HO-03.edb
PF-HO-01.edb

Next I’ll run another backup of HO-EX2010-MB1, but this time the mailbox database MB-HO-01 has been made active on HO-EX2010-MB1.

This time the LastFullBackup time stamp is written to the database.

[PS] C:\>Get-MailboxDatabase -status | ft name,mounted*,lastfull* -auto

Name     MountedOnServer                     Mounted LastFullBackup
----     ---------------                     ------- --------------
MB-HO-01 HO-EX2010-MB1.exchangeserverpro.net    True 11/6/2011 1:40:19 PM
MB-HO-02 HO-EX2010-MB2.exchangeserverpro.net    True
MB-HO-03 HO-EX2010-MB2.exchangeserverpro.net    True
MB-BR-01 BR-EX2010-MB.exchangeserverpro.net     True

So what do we learn from this?

Reminder, the below should be read in conjunction with the notice at the start of the article, as backing up passive database copies using Windows Server Backup is not a supported scenario

  • Yes, passive database copies stored on a volume are backed up by Windows Server Backup
  • Yes, this allows backups of passive database copies to be restored, although not directly
  • Yes, this would allow a backup of a passive database copy to be used for disaster recovery of a database
  • No, the backup time stamp is not written when a passive database copy is backed up, so any monitoring of backups that involves checking that time stamp needs to take that into consideration

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]]> http://exchangeserverpro.com/exchange-2010-passive-database-copies-included-backups-dag-members/feed 0 TechEd Video: Exchange 2010 Virtualization http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-exchange-2010-virtualization http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-exchange-2010-virtualization#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2011 10:20:43 +0000 Paul Cunningham http://exchangeserverpro.com/?p=4153 Here are videos for two sessions from TechEd 2011 that go hand in hand. Both are about Exchange 2010 virtualization, and worth watching if you’re still considering whether to virtualize some or all of your Exchange Server 2010 deployment.

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]]> http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-exchange-2010-virtualization/feed 0 TechEd Video: Upgrading to Exchange 2010: Notes from Field http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-upgrading-exchange-2010-notes-field http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-upgrading-exchange-2010-notes-field#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2011 10:10:47 +0000 Paul Cunningham http://exchangeserverpro.com/?p=4150 If you’re looking for some good tips on migrating to Exchange 2010 then this is a great video to watch. Colin Lee (formerly of Microsoft and now with Dell) and Sofiane Behraoui (Dell) walk through some of the important issues and steps along the way.

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]]> http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-upgrading-exchange-2010-notes-field/feed 0 TechEd Video: Load Balancing with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-load-balancing-microsoft-exchange-server-2010 http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-load-balancing-microsoft-exchange-server-2010#comments Mon, 03 Oct 2011 09:54:53 +0000 Paul Cunningham http://exchangeserverpro.com/?p=4147 This video is for one of the most in-depth sessions I attended at TechEd 2011. It is listed as a Level 300 but at the end of the session the presenter, Andrew Ehrengsing, mentioned that this is about 1 hour of Master level content (ie, from the Microsoft Certified Master training for Exchange 2010).

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]]> http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-load-balancing-microsoft-exchange-server-2010/feed 0 TechEd Video: Exchange Server 2010 High Availability Deep Dive http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-exchange-server-2010-high-availability-deep-dive http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-exchange-server-2010-high-availability-deep-dive#comments Sun, 25 Sep 2011 16:30:52 +0000 Paul Cunningham http://exchangeserverpro.com/?p=4106 In this video from TechEd Australia 2011 Microsoft’s Scott Schnoll takes us under the hood of Exchange 2010 Database Availability Groups. The best parts are the deep coverage of Active Manager, best copy selection, and the often misunderstood Database Activation Coordination (DAC) mode.

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]]> http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-exchange-server-2010-high-availability-deep-dive/feed 0 TechEd Video: Exchange Server 2010 High Availability Concepts http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-exchange-server-2010-high-availability-concepts http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-exchange-server-2010-high-availability-concepts#comments Sun, 25 Sep 2011 15:30:16 +0000 Paul Cunningham http://exchangeserverpro.com/?p=4102 This video from TechEd Australia 2011 is Scott Schnoll’s presentation on Exchange Server 2010 high availability concepts. It is entirely slides and speech, no demonstration, but listen closely because Scott takes defines all of the most critical HA concepts for Exchange 2010 in a way that is highly informative yet very easily understood.

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]]> http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-exchange-server-2010-high-availability-concepts/feed 0 TechEd Video: Audio, Video and Web Conferencing Architecture and Experience http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-audio-video-web-conferencing-architecture-experience http://exchangeserverpro.com/teched-video-audio-video-web-conferencing-architecture-experience#comments Sun, 25 Sep 2011 13:16:50 +0000 Paul Cunningham http://exchangeserverpro.com/?p=4099 This video from TechEd Australia 2011 is from one of my favourite sessions of the entire week. It covers Lync 2010 meeting features and architecture in Microsoft Lync 2010 Client and Server, for both on-premise and Microsoft Office 365 Service deployments.

The best part of this presentation for me was the demonstration of Lync functionality. Lync is one of those products that can be difficult to grasp until you see it live in action. And unlike many other products it is difficult to set up your own demo environment to see it for yourself. So the live demo in this session was a real highlight for me.

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